The author opens with a critique of the NY Times coverage of India in general, small tidbit here (emphasis added):

“Combined with Nick Kristof’s regular martyring operations to rescue underage trafficked prostitutes in Kolkatan brothels, what we have here is a consistent picture of an India that is not yet “fully modern,” informed by the liberal discourse of rights and progress. It seems that the New York Times will never, ever tire of incessantly replicating imperial tropes.”

The bulk of the article then deconstructs the Orientalism in a travel story that appears in the Times’Modern Love column by May Jeong, a Korean Canadian reporter based in Toronto (serving as a reminder that whiteness is not limited by skin color). Surie von Czechowski notes:

“Jeong’s writing is of a piece with that familiar eroticization of India–Orientalist imaginings of the lushness of nature combine with the well-worn tropes of India as chaotic, as a seductive and sexual place of pure experience, spirituality and true self-knowledge, with sinewy yet docile natives. If I had a penny for every time a (usually white and almost always North American or European) person has gushed to me about how much they love India because they found God or themselves there/how it was wild and filthy and beautiful all at the same time, I’d have a serious amount of change by now.”

NY Times’ Modern Love: “Welcomed With Open Arms in Mumbai”, by May Jeong (Illustration: Brian Rea/NY Times)

Again, it reminds us of how exhibitions at the Asian Art Museum operate, reinforcing the Orientalist notion of absolute difference between our all-too-generic workaday West and the exotic East:

“Though Jeong writes about the difference in a way that doesn’t malign it, what is of utmost importance here is that the separateness of the two domains is upheld and reinforced, thus leaving the imperial ideology underpinning Orientalism untouched.”

Much like the museum, this Asian Canadian Westerner asserts that she can transcend this difference, but instead, as Surie von Czechowski points out (emphasis added), “ends up reaffirming the notion of the essential, unchanging, and unchangeable difference…”

Reframing the Contemporary as Ancient, Immutable, “Tradition” of Oriental Otherness: actual text on wall at museum

It’s very much how, with the current PHANTOMS OF ASIA exhibition, the Asian Art Museum reaffirms this same characteristic immutability of absolute difference by re-framing the contemporary by forcing it into a context of pre-modern antiquity, under the euphemisms of “Asian Tradition” and “Contemporary Awakens the Past.”